Studying the final stages of galaxy evolution across cosmic time

One of the key open questions of galaxy evolution is to understand when, how and where the star formation ceases (the so called star formation quenching). It is well known that galaxies have pronounced bimodal distributions of their main prop- erties, and that they are segregated into the two populations of blue star-forming (spiral and irregular) and red passive (elliptical and lenticular) galaxies. There is a general consensus on a scenario in which blue/star-forming galaxies quench their star formation transforming into red passive systems. However, the processes which drive this change in galaxy properties and structure are still unclear. The main goal of this Thesis work is twofold. On the one hand, we aim at defining new methods to select galaxies that are in the critical phase of quenching, or that have recently (e.g. within 0.5 Gyr) terminated their star formation. On the other hand, the final goal is to study the physical properties of the selected galaxies in order to investigate the origin of the quenching, place constraints on how and where (within the galaxies) star formation terminates and understand the possible evolutionary links with the population of E/S0 galaxies.